


Something to Believe In

by DetectiveRoboRyan



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: AU where the MU actually looks Plegian, Alternate Supports, Avatar's mom is mentioned, Aversa needed a hug, Female Friendships, Gen, Miscellaneous Worldbuilding, Sisterly Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-11
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-14 03:44:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4549005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveRoboRyan/pseuds/DetectiveRoboRyan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Robin wants her questions answered, and Aversa is the one to answer them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. C Support

**Author's Note:**

> So I didn't really like the F!MU and Aversa supports very much, and since Aversa gets the short end of the stick in /everything,/ I spent about four hours trying to articulate how I think they'd get along instead. I'm not about that girl hate, man, let's just have everyone be friends! You feel me?

“You look like me.”  
  
The voice was a familiar one, but Aversa couldn’t say she’d expected to hear it often after it assigned her one of the empty rooms in the Shepherd’s barracks and told her how to get there. She also couldn’t say she’d expected to hear it— especially not now, when she was trying to sneak back to her room with her dinner without running into anyone.  
  
“Technically, child,” she replied to the tactician (Robin, wasn’t it?) standing between her and her meal in solace, “I am older, so you look like me.”  
  
“That isn’t the point,” the girl replied. She really didn’t miss a beat. “You’re Plegian too, aren’t you?”  
  
“Unless you attacked the wrong country, yes, I am.” Aversa resisted the urge to roll her eyes, shoot a hex at the girl and run back to her room before her soup cooled off. “Do you often spend your evenings asking about the nationalities of everyone in your little band, or am I a special case?”  
  
Robin frowned. She looked like a young girl like that, frowning up at Aversa from her shorter height, a mussed fringe of white hair over skin that matched Aversa’s exactly. Her coat dragged on the floor behind her, cuffs dangling past her hands— the coat befitting a Plegian high priest or priestess, with designs on purple silk that reminded Aversa of the desert kingdom. This girl was heir to the Plegian throne, Aversa remembered. Better her than Aversa.  
  
“I just wanted to know what it was like,” she finally said. “I don’t remember any of it, but I know I grew up there, I just /know/ it’s where I’m from. I want to know more about that. Wouldn’t you?”  
  
Her words, though Aversa didn’t want to admit it, hit hard. Memories, it appeared, were a tricky thing— having them gone felt like there was a gaping void in your head, and every time you did something because you somehow knew it was the thing you were supposed to do, even though you couldn’t remember learning how to do it, or even if you’d ever done it before, felt like a tug on that emptiness like there were things lost in darkness. And yet when things were revealed, it was sometimes more painful to think about, because you had no way of knowing how much you’d lost. It was like you had parts of yourself that existed, but you didn’t know what made them exist the way they did, whereas everyone else did. It was isolating and painful and generally unpleasant, and apparently it was a side effect of dark magic.  
  
Aversa let out a sigh. “Fine, then. What do you wish to know?”  
  



	2. B Support

Aversa remembered when Robin was two years old, toddling around the palace in purple and gold robes that always ended up stained with ink by the end of the day. She remembered how Robin would crash into her leg while she was carrying stacks of tomes or maps, and grin a drooly baby grin up at her like she was the best thing since yeast. She remembered how Robin would touch her paint with tiny ink-stained hands and say some single-word observation about how it was pretty or the color it was, and the only way Aversa could respond was by camly picking her up and setting her back down on the floor beside the desk.  
  
It was difficult, now, to believe the young woman of twenty sitting next to her at the table in the library reading the old tomes Aversa had kept with her was the same girl.  
  
“I’ve never seen this character before,” Robin noted, adjusting her glasses and looking into one of her journals filled with a slightly newer form of Plegian script. “What does that one mean?”  
  
“It’s an older form of that one,” Aversa answered, tapping a more familiar character with a well-kept fingernail. “It’s pronounced the same.”  
  
“You’re being remarkably compliant,” Robin commented, tilting her head to look at the older script from a different angle. “For someone who bristled so much when I first spoke to her, after all.”  
  
Crap, was she being too compliant? Aversa cleared her throat and folded her arms. “Well, it isn’t every day someone shows true interest in anyone like me. Perhaps I wanted to indulge a bit.”  
  
“That’s a shame, you’re interesting to talk to,” Robin murmured frankly. “You make Plegia sound incredible! I wish I could’ve lived in it through times when there wasn’t a war.”  
  
“Plegia was… always a beautiful country,” Aversa allowed herself to reminisce. “It still is. You’re heir to the throne, you know, you’ll be able to experience it then.”  
  
 “What was it like when I was a baby, though?” Robin turned away from the books to face Aversa, leaning back in her chair with her legs crossed. “I must’ve lived there for at least a little bit. My mother’s journal said we left when I was three… did you ever know my mother?”  
  
“Did I…” Aversa trailed off. A woman in a golden scarf came to mind, with hair the color of the core of a thunder spell, eyes deep and dark and wise like thunderclouds. She had borne the little girl before Validar adopted Aversa, of course, but she had shown Aversa kindness as she would her own children. Helped her with her studies, gave her tips on how to more effectively use magic. Robin had her smile, and her ears. One night she came to Aversa in the dead of the night, kissed her forehead like Aversa was her own daughter, told her she could always find something to believe in and Aversa didn’t know what that meant. They were gone by morning and Aversa would never see her again.  
  
Robin’s eyes were opened wide in anticipation— eager for knowledge, eager to know where she came from. Aversa remembered she was expected to respond.  
  
She couldn’t. “I think that’s enough for today,” she said instead, praying her voice wasn’t as thick as it felt, and left without taking her book.


	3. A Support

The knock that came to Aversa’s door later that night was not entirely unexpected, but not necessarily welcomed at that moment either. But nonetheless, she opened it, and Robin was there, all big gray eyes and solemnity and slender hands gripping the stack of Aversa’s books.  
  
“I brought your books back,” she said, holding them out. “I still don’t quite have the hang of those extra characters, and the verb structure in the older Plegian is a bit weird to me, but I could read them fairly well.”  
  
“Thank you,” Aversa said hollowly, taking the books and setting them on the bedside table, not sure what else she could do.  
  
“And… I’m sorry,” Robin added, looking towards the ground. “If I mentioned something bad when I mentioned my mother. Her journal doesn’t say much about who she was, is all, and… wow, now I have the chance to talk to someone who could have really known her, and I suppose I got a little ahead of myself. You don’t have to say anything about her if you don’t want to.”  
  
Aversa let out a sigh she didn’t know she’d been holding in. “No, child. It’s alright. I’ll tell you about your mother.”  
  
Robin’s face lit up. “You will?”  
  
And Aversa couldn’t help but crack a smile. “You have her hands, and her laugh,” she pointed out first, going to sit down on the stiff bed and gesturing for Robin to sit with her. “I was still fairly young when she left with you, but she treated me as kindly as she would her own child.”  
  
“Wouldn’t that make you my older sister, technically?” Robin asked, smiling with one side of her mouth, and Aversa had to admit she’d never thought of it that way— or maybe just never allowed herself to think of it that way. It required thinking of Validar as her father, and regarding recent events, Aversa wasn’t sure she wanted to do that anymore.  
  
“I don’t think I would mind that, anyway,” Robin remarked. “Having you for an older sister. You’re not a witch or a crony or any other horrible thing anyone else has ever said about you. You’re one of us.”  
  
Aversa didn’t think she had the capacity to cry at this point in her life, but the tears that sprung to her eyes just then proved her wrong. She’d deny it to anyone else, of course, but now she wasn’t sure she could manage to make it seem like she wasn’t. There was a lifetime of capped-up tears there, and they didn’t seem to want to stop.  
  
She felt Robin’s head on her shoulder, arms encased in heavy purple silk wrap around her torso. For a minute she felt like pulling away— but she didn’t, and rested an arm around Robin’s back— around her sister’s back.  
  
“Your mother would be proud of you,” Aversa found herself murmuring, and though she wasn’t expecting it, Robin responded.  
  
“I think she’d be proud of you, too.”


End file.
